Surface Tablet to Come With Stripped-Down Office Suite, Report Says

Microsoft's Surface just faces a couple bumps along the road to launch. Photo: Alexandra Chang/Wired

When Microsoft showed off Office 2013 in July, it told everyone that the company’s popular productivity suite would come built into Windows RT devices, including Microsoft’s Surface tablet. Now it looks like this might not be entirely true. Microsoft is planning to ship a stripped-down, Preview version of Office 2013 on its Windows RT devices, according to a report from The Verge.

Windows RT tablets are expected to ship at the end of October with a Preview version of Office 2013 RT, but users will be able to upgrade to a final version in early 2013. Nonetheless, Office Home and Student 2013 RT won’t come with some staple features, including macros, third-party add-ins or VBA (visual basic for applications) support. And Microsoft will reportedly remove other smaller features as well.

Microsoft is choosing to slim Office RT down to make sure that the apps are more reliable and don’t have a significant impact on the battery life of the devices. The move makes sense considering that Office RT will need to run on ARM processors, which are slower and less powerful than their Intel Core counterparts.

When contacted, a Microsoft spokesperson told Wired, “We have not finalized any packaging for the next release of Office.”

If the report proves true, Microsoft’s decision could hurt the deployment of Windows RT tablets in enterprise situations, where users depend on full-featured Office functions. And if Microsoft needs to remove much more from Office RT, leaving it relatively bare-bones, it might also affect whether everyday consumers purchase Windows RT devices, including Surface. Office currently costs as much as $120 to install on a single PC, so having a full version of the suite on Windows RT has been a big selling point of the Windows RT platform.

And that’s not the only thing that’s putting a stain on Windows RT tablets, especially Surface. Acer CEO JT Wang is speaking openly about how he thinks Microsoft should stick to what it does best: software.

“We have said [to Microsoft] think it over,” Wang told the Financial Times in an interview. “Think twice. It will create a huge negative impact for the ecosystem and other brands may take a negative reaction. It is not something you are good at so please think twice.”

It’s clear that OEMs, despite Microsoft’s statement that Surface is just a “design point,” aren’t happy about Microsoft’s entry into the hardware market. And now they’re speaking out. But that doesn’t mean Microsoft should stray from Surface. There’s a strong argument to be made that Microsoft should in fact just screw its hardware partners.

But there’s always one threat, however unlikely, that OEMs can toss around.

“If Microsoft is going to [have a] hardware business, what should we do?” Campbell Kan, Acer’s president of PC global operations, added. “Should we still rely on Microsoft, or should we find other alternatives?”

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